Weekly Review - Week 35

Posted on August 28, 2017

This post is a summary of my activities related to coding and software in the past week. Its purpose is both to serve as a high-level personal log and as a potential source of interesting (or not so interesting) links. Entries are provided in no particular order with minimal comments…

Efficient Immutable Collections

Immutables collections paves the way for efficient program transformations and parallelization, but they might lead to inefficiencies from garbage collection or repeated traversals. This thesis provides techniques to build efficient immutable collections on the JVM.

GitHub - ipfs/ipfs: IPFS - The Permanent Web

Discovered this fascinating project which is the foundation of numerous other projects, like gx a package management tool.

End To End Testing With Hspec (Almost)

How to (not) use Haskell and Hspec to write end-to-end testing using hspec and hs-webdriver. Looks like recent changes in webdriver broke Haskell’s library…

Interactions of individual and pair programmers with an intelligent tutoring system for computer science | the morning paper

tl;dr: We discovered that while both groups exhibited significant learning gains, pair programmers completed problems more quickly, relied less heavily on system-provided examples, coded more efficiently, and showed higher signs of engagement.

On the design of distributed programming models | the morning paper

Another gem from Adrian Colyer’s treasure trove: What’s needed in languages to fully support distributed systems programming?

Growing a protocol | the morning paper

This paper triggered some research on distributed systems testing, along with:

Yet Another Visit to Paxos

One the numerous Paxos papers, this time introducing crash-tolerance and Byzantine failure tolerance. Lead to PBFT-Smart algorithm.

Hire Like the Israeli Military

Detailed article on practical application of Daniel Kahneman’s hiring techniques from Thinking, Fast and Slow. In the book, Kahneman advocates the use of a simple rating system based on questions to identify observable behaviours of hired persons and objectivize their past experience.

haskell - The Pause monad - Stack Overflow

One article from a series I read this weekend trying to acquire a deeper understanding of Free monad construction and how to implement pause/resume on top of Free

The Comonad.Reader » Free Monads for Less (Part 1 of 3): Codensity

A serie of article from Ed Kmett on the Free monad construction and how to make it more efficient, followed by: